Unofficial news and tips about Google

April 24, 2008

YouTube Suggest

The always surprising video sharing service acquired by Google in October 2006 is constantly improving its search features and borrows many tricks from its parent company. The latest enhancement is an auto-complete feature that shows query suggestions as you start typing characters in the search box. You'll notice the obvious similarity between this feature and Google Suggest, a project that is about to finally graduate from Google Labs. YouTube Suggest has its own list of queries obtained from YouTube users, so it should offer decent suggestions.

"By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make your searches more convenient and efficient by keeping you from having to reformulate your query. Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing," explains Google in an interesting FAQ.

The feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it in the "Settings". For now, YouTube Suggest seems to be live only for international sites like YouTube UK and only if you search from the homepage, but it should be available at YouTube's main site in the near future.

where ds=yt defines the search's scope (YouTube), while q=QUERY includes the characters typed by the user. A similar URL is used by Google News to suggest news sources in advanced search, so we can expect an API for query suggestions:

YouTube constantly experiments with new features and most of them are related to the way people navigate the site or discover new videos. A recent experiment added a search box below the list of related videos so that people can search and see the search results while watching a video. The only problem was that you couldn't add the results to the Quicklist in order to build dynamic playlists.

30 comments:

This probably isn't news, but I noticed that Wikipedia has added a Suggest feature to their search box. At least for the English version in the sidebar. Although I think it is suggesting exact page matches, as opposed to listing searches and the number of pages matching.

What's the purpose of an auto-complete feature if it doesn't have some logic behind it? When I type "yah" in Wikipedia's search box, the suggestions are: "Yah", "Yah Bak", "Yah Kai", "Yah Lin Trie", "Yah mater", "Yah Mo B There", but not "Yahoo", which is the obvious suggestion. Displaying some topics alphabetically doesn't help anyone, especially if you have millions of topics.

Which clip from Youtube do you suggest for exercising on a stationnary bicycle?I plan to do some workout (stationary bicycle) and I'd like to know about some good videos (short clips) I could listen to while training, from Youtube or another source. (I'll make a montage.)

For example, I was thinking about the "Rocky IV training sequence", or "What a feeling" from the Flashdance movie...

I find the function useless and most of the suggestions tasteless and disturbing. I would happily send a year's worth of lapdancers to whoever Youtube employee who rids us of the abominable Search Suggestions.

Because of the far-left liberal socialist views of the people in charge at google and youtube it's one-size-fits-all youtube search suggestions in-your-face and no option to turn it off. Very telling of the mentality at that place.

What's with the youtube search suggestions? I can't disable it. It overrides my browser settings. That's not cool. Don't muck with my machine, youtube. The only alternative is that I stop visiting youtube.

Yeah, that's it. I'm going to use other video websites from now on. You might be big, youtube, but to me you're just another website.